The Star is yet another plank in the theory supporting the idea that Science Fiction was almost single-handedly created by H.G. Wells. The Star, is a tale of the ultimate in habitat destruction (poof goes the planet).

A selection of imagery scanned from “The World of the Dark Crystal” a 2003 compendium of conceptual art, design and illustration produced for Jim Henson’s 1982 fantasy movie masterpiece “The Dark Crystal”.

The foremost concern, that an explicit queer sex scene will automatically make certain readers not buy your book, has an unfortunately strong basis. Discussion of one of the examples I use frequently, Richard K. Morgan’s The Steel Remains, is a case in point: many reviewers and commentators, as well as commenters here, expressed the sentiment that they would not ever pick up the book because they didn’t want to see the gay sex in it.
…
I hate this argument to not read a book, unless the reader chooses to never read a book with sexual content at all ever. I think it’s generous to say that 90% of speculative fiction is about straight characters, many of whom have sex with other straight characters in varying degrees of explicitness.

And you know what? Queer people read those books, and most aren’t particularly excited by those straight sex scenes—but if they’re in a good book, what’s the problem? It’s part of the characters and their relationships. The point of sex in speculative fiction is not solely to be an erotic experience for the reader. If the entire turning point of a reader picking up a book is how titillating they personally find the sex in it, I suspect they should be reading erotica, not speculative fiction. If a queer person reads straight sex in a good book, why won’t a straight person read queer sex in a good book?

The excuse that a book isn’t worth reading solely because it contains queer sex is homophobic. Cushion it however one may, it is. The fear and disgust that motivates a reader to avoid a book about a queer character has a definitive root, and it isn’t prudishness.

They have found, definitely, 306 new extra-solar planets, including 5 systems with multiple planets. Unlike previous searches, most of the planets that Kepler found are Neptune-sized (the smallest gas giant in our Solar System) or smaller!

That’s very, very promising! But they’ve left us with the ultimate teaser: they are withholding data — for a year — on 400 particularly juicy candidates!

What did they find? Are they Earth-sized planets? Are they planets in the habitable zones around their stars? Are they “just barely” detections, and they want to get some more data?

If we assume that each one is a planet, that brings us to 706 planets around 100,000 stars. Since our galaxy has around 200 billion stars, we can figure out that there ought to be — wait for it — at least 1.4 billion planets in our galaxy!

And that, mind you, is a lower limit, as this only will see planets orbiting edge-on to their stars! But it’s the biggest lower limit we’ve ever been able to set, and you’re among the first to know!

Here is the first episode of a serie I created about Giants.
Each episode will have a different Giant.
The idea is to travel through the world of the Giant and discover the untold truth about them and their conflicts with the human being.